pieces of poetry or rhetoric.  Among the common sort of people, I never could perceive that painting had much influence on their passions.  It is true that the best sorts of painting, as well as the best sorts of poetry, are not much understood in that sphere.  But it is most certain that their passions are very strongly roused by a fanatic preacher, or by the ballads of Chevy Chase, or the Children in the Wood, and by other little popular poems and tales that are current in that rank of life.  I do not know of any paintings, bad or good, that produce the same effect.  So that poetry, with all its obscurity, has a more general, as well as a more powerful dominion over the passions, than the other art.  And I think there are reasons in nature, why the obscure idea, when properly conveyed, should be more affecting than the clear.  It is our ignorance of things that causes all our admiration, and chiefly excites our passions.  Knowledge and acquaintance make the most striking causes affect but little.  It is thus with the vulgar; and all men are as the vulgar in what they do not understand.  The ideas of eternity, and infinity, are among the most affecting we have:  and yet perhaps there is nothing of which we really understand so little, as of infinity and eternity.  We do not anywhere meet a more sublime description than this justly-celebrated one of Milton, wherein he gives the portrait of Satan with a dignity so suitable to the subject: 

              “He above the rest
    In shape and gesture proudly eminent
    Stood like a tower; his form had yet not lost
    All her original brightness, nor appeared
    Less than archangel ruined, and th’ excess
    Of glory obscured:  as when the sun new risen
    Looks through the horizontal misty air
    Shorn of his beams; or from behind the moon
    In dim eclipse disastrous twilight sheds
    On half the nations; and with fear of change
    Perplexes monarchs.”

Here is a very noble picture; and in what does this poetical picture consist?  In images of a tower, an archangel, the sun rising through mists, or in an eclipse, the ruin of monarchs and the revolutions of kingdoms.  The mind is hurried out of itself, by a crowd of great and confused images; which affect because they are crowded and confused.  For separate them, and you lose much of the greatness; and join them, and you infallibly lose the clearness.  The images raised by poetry are always of this obscure kind; though in general the effects of poetry are by no means to be attributed to the images it raises; which point we shall examine more at large hereafter.[14] But painting, when we have allowed for the pleasure of imitation, can only affect simply by the images it presents; and even in painting, a judicious obscurity in some things contributes to the effect of the picture; because the images in painting are exactly similar to those in nature; and in nature, dark, confused, uncertain images have a greater power on the fancy to form the grander passions, than those have which are more clear and determinate.  But where and when this observation may be applied to practice, and how far it shall be extended, will be better deduced from the nature of the subject, and from the occasion, than from any rules that can be given.